This semi-secret Lego Smart Brick feature gives it even more potential
To my surprise, the company introduced an additional feature that I doesn’t I saw in my first demo, perhaps the most impressive if these bricks were to reach adult builders: an accurate distance measurement.
The Lego Group’s head of design, Maarten Simons, created a “Lego ruler” made up of standard Lego bricks divided into segments each with 10 Lego studs, or about 8 cm (3.15 inches) long. He attached a Smart Brick to one end of the ruler and slid a second Smart Brick along its length. The Smart Bricks changed color with each passage of 10 additional blocks, exactly at the dividing lines of each segment.
Simons then moved the Smart Bricks away from the ruler and performed the same trick. Using just a pair of Smart Bricks, he was able to measure the distance between two points in 2D and 3D space. Simons says the bricks can accurately track each other’s position at distances up to about 4 to 5 meters (12 to 16 feet).
Next, Simons spun a brick in the air and we saw it light up as soon as it was precisely facing the other brick.
From previous briefings, I already knew that bricks could say theirs orientation and whether they were relatively closer or further away from each other. But it’s clearly more powerful than that, with more potential than the first three Legos. Star Wars sets will be offered on launch day (assuming these precision features work in the real world with all its forms of wireless interference).
Lego Star Wars sets very intentionally allow kids to blow up each other’s ships without they actually face each other, because the company’s research shows that kids prefer that. But it clearly doesn’t have to be that way. Low-hanging fruit: Future Lego creations could have precise blasting play.
They might also have potential in Lego robots. Lego Mindstorms was one of the toymaker’s most sophisticated building sets, but even with drag-and-drop programming capabilities, its complexity limited its appeal to children. With the Smart Brick’s ability to know its location and orientation relative to other Smart Bricks, Lego robots could potentially navigate obstacles built with Smart Tags, or autonomously find their way back to base stations without the need for detailed programming, detection cameras, or more expensive components like Mindstorms’ Smart Brick.
Lego is extremely tight-lipped about future plans for its new Smart Play system, but it’s only getting more interesting, with more potential uses, as the company reveals what the bricks are capable of.
